Peace: Inside - Out

Wow.

I just listened to an 8 minute video by Seane Corn. I registered for an online conference called 'Yoga is...' and this was a promotional video on the topic, 'How to deal with limiting beliefs and the tools you can use to release them.'

Here are some 'peaces' of her talk (ha):

If I want peace to be made manifest on a national or global level, then I have to recognize the ways in which I am not actually engaging peacefully in my own life.

The activist's role or quest is to take accountability to recognize the ways in which we are complicit in perpetuating separation...and healing those perspectives in ourselves so that when we look at the world, we are able to engage in a way that is more spiritually literate, and actually make a difference...not by telling our leaders how they need to change, but actually stepping into roles of leadership ourselves and from the inside-out helping to develop policy that puts humanity first.

We have to recognize the ways that we participate in creating continued separation and have the hard conversations around race, class, sex, gender, ageism, ableism...all of that.

If we're not looking at that within ourselves, (asking): 'What have (I) learned? What do (I) believe? How was that indoctrinated within (my) body-mind? How did I pick up information based on my culture, my education, my religion, my ancestry... the system that influences the way I see the 'other' as different?

When I can take accountability and sit with it in my own body... (and) choose to learn about some of these perceptions that are oppressive, and choose not to enact that oppression onto an 'other'..., then maybe peace wouldn't just be possible, but perhaps it would be inevitable. 

The individual influences the collective, the collective is what makes up the systems, the 'systems' is what needs to be changed, because very often our systems are what are creating these continued levels of oppression that create such a huge divide amongst human beings based on things like color, like religion, like gender, like sexuality.

And so the true spiritual activist doesn't just point that finger outward, but looks at the other three fingers pointing inward at themselves and says 'let me do my work' and simultaneously look at the world around us and say 'how do I make a change' by the ways in which I engage from a place of love, compassion, empathy,...and be willing to use my voice as a way that empowers not just me and my own limited experience, but all beings. 

Um...
that's all I wanted to share (emoticon).